Friday, June 4, 2010

Louisiana Gets Its Own Green Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Let's be honest, lately there hasn't been a lot of good news coming out of Louisiana, the gulf coast has taken quite the beating with the economic fallout from the BP oil spill. Finally we have some good news for the region. They now have their very own Cloud IaaS platform based in Lafayette, Louisiana -- a City that is quickly emerging as one of the best and most connected in the country.

Technology initiatives have helped fuel the region’s thriving business environment while building up a tech-savvy community. The City of Lafayette developed the nation’s largest and most robust municipally-owned fiber optic broadband infrastructure delivering 100 Megabit per second (Mbps) peer-to-peer broadband network within its city limits; another confirmation of lightening fast data connections and forward thinking.

Businesses in this creative environment are joining forces with worldwide service providers to create IT solutions with international applications. One such pairing is the Abacus Data Exchange (Lafayette, LA) and Enomaly. Together we have brought the concepts of “Cloud Computing” and “Elastic Platforms” into the local vocabulary. Picture a very green communications/data center with direct access to virtual dedicated servers for end-user applications, running on blazing fast fiber optic broadband network and connecting to anywhere on the planet.

To give you a little background on Lafayette, according to several studies naming “best” locations in the United States, Lafayette, Louisiana is a top choice as a place to live, to start a business, to enjoy the creative class and be happy. Relocate America lists Lafayette, Louisiana as one of the "Top 100 Places to Live". For this year's list, the editorial team focused on communities poised for recovery and future growth. They discovered that this mid-sized Louisiana city showed strong local leadership, employment opportunities, thriving community commitment, improving real estate markets, growing green initiatives, plentiful recreational options and overall high quality of life. Lafayette has a population of fewer than 200,000 and is located near the Gulf Coast, halfway between New Orleans and Houston.

Fortune Small Business ranked Lafayette as the #2 mid-sized city in the nation for small business startups. Lafayette was also named by Southern Business & Development Magazine as one of the top cities in the South for the "Creative Class". This designation is based on the community's commitment to technology, forward thinking and cultural diversity. And the list goes on... Louisiana ranks #1 in happiness according to Science Magazine's survey of 1.3 million people across the USA.

So why does Louisiana need it's own Cloud?

When the Abacus research team set out to design a next-generation cloud computing solution, it found a partner in Enomaly and its Elastic Computing Platform. By combining Abacus's expertise in managing green fiber optic broadband datacenters and Enomaly's cutting edge cloud computing technology, the Abacus Data Cloud offers direct access to variably sized on-demand virtual servers for end-user applications. Customers can easily provision their own virtual, high-performance, green-friendly on-line datacenter services within a matter of hours not days, using only the resources they need for the duration that they need them. The clean and simple Customer User Interface allows customers to tailor their cloud environment by provisioning virtual machines with specific application stacks and resource capacity. Built-in resource and usage monitoring provides real-time integrated billing and network reporting.

Customers are using the cloud platform to quickly and easily create virtual servers to host web sites, run internal business applications and provide burst capacity to meet peak loads when working on data-intensive operations.

“Working with Enomaly's ECP- SPE solution to provide our customers a cloud solution has been surprisingly easy. I've never felt more confident in the stability, user-friendliness and over all personalization of a publicly accessible interface as I do with Enomaly. Knowing that we have created a superior product benefits everyone” said Bryan Fuselier, CIO, Abacus Data Exchange

In addition to accessing virtual cloud resources, through the Abacus Data Cloud anyone, anywhere can replicate (take a virtual snapshot) their existing servers to prevent data and configuration loses, or plan for server replacement and upgrades on their own schedule.. Replica servers are activated when needed and turned off when tasks are finished. Additionally, everyone reduces server/IT infrastructure cost by moving towards a ‘green’ solution that cuts down on high utility use, cooling needs and hardware server support . The end-user’s ability to test new applications or engage in Web 2.0 development allows them to gain more effectiveness in critical in day-to-day operations. Cost savings kick in when businesses build extremely flexible server resources through leasing shared infrastructure. Businesses can create, access and manage these servers from any Internet connection through a personalized web-based dashboard that scales server resources up and down dynamically based on demand.

The Abacus Data Cloud delivers some of the world's fastest cloud computing, and people are is taking notice. “We are excited to include Abacus as a customer and we will be following their growing venture opportunities closely”, stated Dr. Richard Reiner, CEO of Enomaly. “We see great potential for a customizable, scalable and reliable high-speed virtual provisioning service using the Service Provider Edition of our Elastic Computing Platform in conjunction with a proven combination of a low-footprint data center and a high-speed fiber network solution.”

Customers can set up individual servers on their own within minutes, and entire datacenters can be virtualized within a matter of days. And because of Enomaly's integrated billing and network usage monitoring along with their clean user interface and clustering support, the Abacus Data Cloud offers the most cost-effective and customer-friendly cloud computing solution on the market today.

"The implications and potential are absolutely enormous" says Abigail Ransonet, CVO of Abacus. "The Abacus Data Cloud on a unified elastic computing platform running Enomaly's ECP SPE is a replicable business model that has a world wide customer-base. We create super-fast, easy-to-use virtual computing environments that businesses can scale up and down as needed. Our model exemplifies the dynamics of fiber optic broadband and innovative solutions. Building and managing on-line unified server technology just got very personal! We all have a sense of pride that we live and work in Lafayette, Louisiana, while we offer the entire world innovative technology solutions."

Learn more at abacusdataexchange.com

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